Getting my feet wet

It was finally the May night I had waited years for.

It was still, quite literally, freezing, but warm enough the Yellowknife River had finally started to break up. I bundled up as if I was going out on tour — leggings, mittens, a toque, but Birkenstocks.

My recently purchased kayak, which since weeks earlier, had made a home of my stairs, could finally be loaded through the three rows of my Sienna all the way to the dash and taken out to the Ingraham Trail for a midnight paddle amongst thousands of migratory birds.

With my pants and leggings pushed up, I walked my kayak into the river, hopped in, dried off my feet, pulled on thick woolen socks and shimmied the towel down between my feet and the bottom of the kayak for a little insulation, and set off upstream to meet the edge of the ice, and then back downstream to meet birds as far as the eye could see.

It was bliss, everything I had been missing and longing for about the late spring, but yes, storage may remain a small issue…